In his candlelit svatyně, The Golěm looks again at a woman’s photograph on the wall, then extinguishes the candles and leaves, affirming to himself that he is “reborn.”

In his flat’s dim light, he enters his dressing room and rehangs his hooded cloak and platform boots, brushing off dried clay from the costume. He recalls that he always “receives the Ether” unclothed and in total darkness, treating it as a ritual journey. He notes that tourists fear the clay-monster look, while Prague locals barely react amid the city’s theatrical street life.

The Golěm recounts Prague’s oldest golem legend: Rabbi Judah Loew forms a clay guardian from the Vltava’s banks and animates it by inscribing emet (truth) on its forehead. The guardian protects the Jewish ghetto until it turns violent and attacks its creator, who stops it by erasing the letter aleph, changing emet (truth) into met (dead), collapsing the creature.

Seeing his costume hanging “inanimately,” The Golěm frames himself as another incarnation in a cycle of souls, summoned to protect the woman in the photograph without her ever knowing. He reflects that he has already killed one of her betrayers, Brigita Gessner, and still hears Gessner’s desperate revelations about what she and her co-conspirators did.

Determined to punish all the betrayers—some in Prague and others far away with power—The Golěm commits to a single method to stop them: he will destroy everything they have created.